Around Quarter of Elon Musk’s followers on Twitter are Spam or Fake, a Study Shows

Renowned tech billionaire Elon Musk recently purchased the social media giant Twitter. He has a huge user base on the platform with 93 Million followers. However, according to a recent audit, it appears that around a quarter (23.42%) of those followers are fake or spam accounts.

SparkToro and Followerwonk were the groups that carried out the audit. They stated that their definitions of ‘spam’ and ‘fake’ may differ from Twitter. The company claims that 50,000 accounts were recognized as non-spam using a system of 17 warning signals on an algorithm that ran 35,000 bogus Twitter accounts bought by SparkToro.

Around a Quarter of Elon Musk’s followers on Twitter are Fake, a Study Shows

If one of the billionaire’s followers was tagged for several spam signals, they were classified as low-quality or fraudulent. Inactive users who hadn’t tweeted in 90 days comprise 70.23 percent of Musk’s followers, according to the study. Furthermore, the study entails that 73 percent of Musk’s Twitter followers had spam-related keywords on their accounts, and 71 percent utilized places that didn’t match any region.

Furthermore, 41% of the accounts had display names that followed spam account patterns. A significant number of accounts (69%) had been inactive for more than 120 days. 83% of followers had a “suspiciously small number of followers,” and 78 percent followed an “unusually small number of accounts.”

For a more detailed examination, the teams used indicators such as the account’s age, the number of tweets sent over time, and the use of Twitter’s default profile picture.

SparkToro described fake accounts as being “those that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem. Those that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem.

The researchers concluded that the bogus or spam accounts were not necessarily harmful because they may be bots aggregating news and tweeting photographs from around the world. According to Business Insider, spam accounts were “guilty of peddling propaganda and disinformation, promoting phishing attempts or malware, manipulating stocks and cryptocurrencies, and attempting to harass other users.”

The evaluation comes after Musk declared last week that he would put his $44 billion Twitter takeover on ice unless the firm can verify that less than 5% of its followers are fraudulent. In a heated dispute with Musk, Twitter CEO Prag Agarwal defended the business’s stats, claiming that the firm suspends half a million spam accounts per day.

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